Help dating a photo please

[Phoenix]

Have just found this, dated as 1906: https://pastonglass.wordpress.com/20...-cold-outside/


I have just realised that the coat does up the same way in both photos. Were baby clothes uni-sex??

[Merry]

I expect baby clothes were made for the benefit of the mother when it came to buttons. Most mother's would be right-handed so placing the buttons "for a girl" would possibly make things simpler.

I remember my mum angsting over this when I was a child, because she was an expert knitter and often made layettes for mothers-to-be (always 2ply, always white!) - she said when she was younger she would always make the buttonholes "the girls way" because it was easier for the mother (assuming righthandedness), but she felt that in later years this had become frowned upon for baby boys, so she would knit both bands with buttonholes and then wait for the sex of the baby to be announced before sewing the buttons to the "correct" side, hiding one set of buttonholes.

[Phoenix]

Ooh, thanks, Merry. The trouble with the past is that we don't know what we don't know. Mum used to get so irritated by dramas set during WW2. "They didn't wear their hats like that!" ended up as asynonym for historical inaccuracy for any kind.